As this year’s Guggenheim International Gala performer, Lorde had two big fashion moments: the first in a haute couture gown on the red carpet and the second in a gold suit on stage. For each one, Lorde opted to wear Christian Dior—and the story behind each outfit’s creation is as impressive as the looks themselves.

For her red carpet dress, the singer opted to wear a dreamy peach haute couture gown from Dior’s autumn/winter 2018 collection. That piece alone took 300 hours of work to create. Lorde used her own hair as a scarf in a literal twist on accessories.

Savoir-faire photos below show all that went into the top of the dress:

On stage, Lorde had her real golden moment in a metallic suit. The lamé jacquard look was custom-made, as the singer wanted “something gold and dazzling” to wear for the performance, per Dior.

Her classic “Bar” jacket was inspired by one of the house’s spring/summer 2022 ready-to-wear styles. It took 40 hours to make the outfit, and three people in the haute couture atelier tailleur worked on it. The images below show how the jacket was made, from sketch to gold finish:

This is one of Lorde’s biggest moments on stage in years.

Lorde spoke to Vogue for its October issue about how she switches between living life in the public eye and living it away from it. “I’m great at my job, but I’m not sure I’m the man for the job,” she said. “I’m a highly sensitive person. I’m not built for pop star life. To have a public-facing existence is something I find really intense and is something I’m not good at. That natural charisma is not what I have. I have the brain in the jar.”

“But for whatever reason people have allowed me to say, Okay, I’m going to come and do the thing—do the shoot, do the red carpet, speak to the journalists, put the music out—and when I’ve done it to the point of total exhaustion, when I have completely quenched that thirst, I’m going to go home, and you’re not going to see me for two or three or four years,” she continued. “I’ll be doing the other thing, which is being there for every single birthday and dinner party and cooking every single meal and going on every single walk and taking every single bath. And when I’ve done that, and I’m like, all right, that’s enough of that for a little while, I’ll come back again.”

Alyssa Bailey
News and Strategy Editor Alyssa Bailey is the news and strategy editor at ELLE.com, where she oversees coverage of celebrities and royals (particularly Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton).

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